Dr Stefan Leutenegger

Imperial PWP | Google Scholar | Publications

I am a Reader (USA equivalent Associate Professor) in Robotics. Besides leading the Smart Robotics Lab, I co-lead research projects at the Dyson Robotics Lab that is led by Prof. Andrew Davison. My research is centred around autonomous robot navigation: robots need dedicated sensing capabilities as well as algorithms for localisation inside a potentially unknown environment. This includes localisation and mapping with a suite of sensors, most importantly cameras, to be processed efficiently to yield accurate results at real-time.

Short Bio

• Since October 2014: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Reader in Robotics, Imperial College London, UK
• 2009-2014: PhD Student and Research Assistant, ETH Zurich (Autonomous Systems Lab), Switzerland
• 2003-2008: BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering with focus on Robotics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Current PhD Students and Postdocs

PhD Students

• Nils Funk
• Dorian Henning (Dyson Robotics Lab)
• Chris Choi
• Sotiris Papatheodorou
• Binbin Xu
• Charlie Houseago (Dyson Robotics Lab)

Post-docs

• Dimos Tzoumanikas

External Advisor/Expert

• Abel Gawel, ETH Zurich
• Yiming Wang, Queen Mary University
• Alejo Concha, Universidad de Zaragoza
• Raul Mur Artal, Universidad de Zaragoza
• Christian Forster, University of Zurich

Alumni

• Dr Wenbin Li (now Lecturer at University of Bath)
• Tristan Laidlow (Dyson Robotics Lab, now post-doc there)
• Andrea Nicastro (Dyson Robotics Lab, now at Facebook Zurich)

Awards

• President’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2018
• ECCV’16 best paper award with “Real-Time 3D Reconstruction and 6-DoF Tracking with an Event Camera“
• PhD Thesis Distinction (ETH Medal 2015)

Invited Talks

• Keynote at BMVA Symposium on Geometry and Deep Learning
  London, July 2019
• Invited talk at ICRA 2019 workshop on Dataset Generation and Benchmarking of SLAM Algorithms for Robotics and VR/AR
  Montreal, Canada, May 2019
• Invited talk at ICRA 2019 workshop on High Accuracy Mobile Manipulation in Challenging Environments
  Montreal, Canada, May 2019
• Invited talk at the 44th Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision Colloquium
  Prague, April 2019
• Invited talk at the Swedish Symposium on Image Analysis
  Gothenburg, March 2019
• Invited talk at International Symposium on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
  NYU Abu Dhabi, March 2019
• Invited talk at ETH
  Zurich October 2018
• Invited talk at Google UK
  London, April 2018
• Invited talk at London CV Meetup
  London, March 2018
• Invited speaker in ICCV’17 workshop “3D Reconstruction Meets Sematics“
  Venice, Italy, October 2017
• Invited speaker in IROS’17 workshop “Learning for Localization and Mapping“
  Vancouver, Canada, September 2017
• Invited lecture in the 2017 Intelligent Sensing Summer School
  September 2017, Queen Mary University London
• Invited seminar in the Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference
  September 2017, Maynooth University, Ireland
• Talking at 2037: Tech Foresight
  London, 14th June 2017
• Invited seminar at University of Zaragoza by Prof. Javier Civera
  Zaragoza, 28th April 2017
• Invited seminar at Queen Mary University London by Dr Ildar Farkhadtinov
  London, 12th April 2017
• Invited talk at Crop Disease, Diagnostics & Detection workshop
  Imperial College, Silwood Park, 16th February 2017
• Seminar at robo-taxi startup Zoox
  Palo Alto, California, 28th October 2016
• Invited speaker in IROS’16 workshop “State Estimation and Terrain Perception“
  Daejeon, South Korea, 14th October 2016
• Talk in “Big-O Meetup” organised by Dirk Gorissen
  London, 22nd August 2016
• Guest Lecture in “UAV Technology” by Dr Mirko Kovac
  Imperial College London, 17th March 2016
• Talk at ETH Zurich, visiting the Agile and Dexterous Robotics Lab (Prof. Jonas Buchli)
  Zurich, 2nd March 2016
• Talk at University of Zurich, Robotics and Perception Group (Prof. Davide Scaramuzza)
  Zurich, 3rd March 2016
• Talk at Imperial Robotics Showcase
  London, 25th September 2015
• Talk at UCL, visiting Dr Gabriel Brostow‘s group
  London, 1st July 2015
• Talk in Playfair Capital Artificial Intelligence Showcase
  London, 5th June 2015
• Talk in “Summer School on Sensing”
  Lille, France, 18th-22nd May 2015
• Guest Lecture in “UAV Technology” by Dr Mirko Kovac
  Imperial College London, 20th March 2015
• Talk in “Rank Prize Mini-symposium on Sensing and Automation in Crop Production”
  Grasmere, Lake District, UK, 13th-16th October 2014
  
• Lecture in “Autonomous MAVs Summer School”
  Zurich, Switzerland, July 2013
• Lecture in “AIRobots Summer School”
  Zurich, Switzerland, July 2012

Patents

• S. Leutenegger, et al. Omnidirectional Spherical Blimp, 2012, Swiss patent (provisional).

Professional Activities

Professional Affiliations

• Member, IEEE
• Member, British Machine Vision Association (BMVA)

Organising Committees
Sponsorship and Demo Chair BMVC 2017

Associate Editor
RA-L, IVCJ, IJCV special issue

Area Chair
ICRA 2016/2018/2019

Program Committee
AAMAS 2012 and 2013, RSS 2015/2016, CVPR 2016/2017/2018/2019, ECCV 2016, ICCV 2019

Journal & Conference Reviewer
TPAMI, IJCV, T-RO, IJRR, JFR, JINT, AURO, TCST,
RSS, ICRA, IROS, ECCV/ICCV, CVPR, SSRR, ICAUS

Consultancy and Startups

I consult for several companies in the UK and abroad, and I am co-founder of SLAMcore.